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Beauty and Cruel Reality

August 05, 2010 - Filed under: Rider Blogs

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Yesterday's stage four of the Tour of Poland brought us into the mountains. Alps? No. Pyrennes? Not quite. The Sierra Nevadas? Nay, friend. The Rockies?! Nope, wrong continent. Instead we entered into the lesser known Carpathian Mountains or Carpathians, a beautiful arcing mountain range from the Czech Republic to Romania.

The race profile as seen in the photo here indicates razor sharp climbs. Now having raced the ferociously steep mountains of the Giro d'Italia in the not too distant past and the Tour of Austria just a few weeks ago, my relative sense of what constitutes "mountains" may be slightly skewed. Now twelve hours later, having completed the stage, it would be more accurate describe the roads through the Carpathians as similar to those of Liege-Bastogne-Liege, which is to say, they are steep hills or extended hills of say three to seven kilometers, but no combination of steep and long. At least not in the mountains we've traversed.

It was clear that virtually every team in the peloton had orders yesterday to be in the breakaway as we averaged 53kph in the first hour and we had settled down to just 49.5kph in ninety minutes when the breakaway finally set off alone. Dominique, in pursuit of mountain points, made the breakaway, which is great. While he then went on to collect top points on the first categorized climb, unfortunately he spent so much energy getting into the day's break that he was eventually dropped and lost the jersey. Knowing Dom, though, the race for that jersey is far from over and he will continue to fight tooth and nail to be back in pink (...the color of the climber's jersey).

The sport of cycling is a beautiful as it can be cruel. I could see that Xavi Tondo, our GC rider this week, was riding effortlessly while many others in the peloton were being dropped. Especially in the final finishing circuits, which featured one of the aforementioned short steep climbs, Xavi was at the front of the pack just following moves. I thought to relay to him that a punishing attack on this finish could result in a win if he was able to then TT to the line. Sadly, the extremely rough roads caught Xavi off guard at the base of the descent and he hit the pavement hard enough to break his collarbone. I slowed to a stop, waited for Xavi, and eventually escorted him to the finish; the agony on his face as he winced the final 10km was heartbreaking.

The best news is that after a visit to the hospital he has discovered that the fracture is relatively very minimal. He is on his way home now to mend his body from this tumble. Furthermore, Xavi's is perpetually easy-going and nearly always has an ear-to-ear smile on his face, so we can already see that he'll be back to his normal self in no time.